We typically choose cherry tomatoes for fresh dishes, but they’re delicious when preserved and cooked. The easiest way to save cherry tomatoes is to freeze them, as I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon, along with my favorite way to cook cherry tomatoes and intensify their tart-sweet taste.

You can make this week’s pasta sauce with other tomatoes, fresh or frozen, but it won’t “pop” as the skins burst and you may want to stir in a tablespoon of honey or sugar at the end if the tomatoes aren’t as sweet. Larger tomatoes may also release more juice—which means you’ll need more of them to end up with the same volume of sauce and they’ll take longer to cook down. When freezing larger tomatoes to cook into pasta sauce, soup, or stew, you can cut them in chunks and bag them by weight. It takes a little more time than freezing them whole, but tomato chunks need far less freezer space.

Learn more about freezing and using cherry tomatoes and get the complete recipe for Pasta That Pops in my column.

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Cherry tomatoes can also be halved and dehydrated. Both the prep and the drying time take longer than freezing, but the resulting pieces are more versatile. You can use them in any savory dishes that call for sun-dried tomatoes or dried cranberries, cherries, or raisins, like salads, fried rice, and even savory granola. They bake nicely into focaccia or sourdough bread loaves too.

You can also rehydrate and cook them into a pasta sauce or soup, fold them into omelets, or spread them on pizza. As a rehydration twist, I like to drop them into leftover lightly flavored pickle brine, where they plump up with the vinegar after a couple of days and can be spread on crostini like bruschetta.

I can cherry tomatoes too—again, a process that takes more time than freezing but produces ready-to-use, shelf-stable jars. In cold months, pickled cherry tomatoes can be tossed with hot pasta like you might do for a peak-of-summer dish. I can them into a salsa with grilled corn for another taste-of-summer hit. On their own with just some sugar and herbs or spices, they make a sweet tomato jam.

You can learn more about quick preservation techniques in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.